Dreams, Thoughts, Moments

Hello all, and thank you so much for stopping by.  I'm in denial about the date (moving is imminent), but I can't deny that it's Friday and time for a new challenge at A Vintage Journey.  The wonderful Toni is our host, and she's looking for Pairs, Trios and Sets.  This is definitely a challenge after my own heart - I create in pairs, trios and sets more often than not, so here's what I came up with...

There's obviously a wealth of inspiration from my fellow Creative Guides over at A Vintage Journey, but before you go, let me share a few close-ups and details of this leafy tag trio.  I'll try to keep it short, as I don't have many spare moments as I try to bring my dreams and thoughts to fruition by moving to a new country in the middle of a global pandemic!!

I'm mostly crafting in quick sessions and then throwing things together from those sessions.  So the backgrounds were from some quick inky playtime to start the day before packing.

There are both Distress Inks and Oxides here - a range of colours, not sure I can be comprehensive with a list of colours...

... but somewhere in there are definitely Vintage Photo, Crackling Campfire, Faded Jeans, Broken China, Walnut Stain, Rusty Hinge, Stormy Sky.

And then just lots of dipping and smooshing and water-spritzing, always drying between layers to get the inky splotches I love.

The other crafting session was one inspired by Tim Holtz's Saturday demo on leaf-making... not that I need any encouragement to make autumn leaves, as anyone who's been paying attention around here lately could tell you.

But I did have a lovely time playing with inks, dies, embossing folders, stamps, mica sprays, and gilding wax to create this pile of leaves ready for shushling through.

Many are cut using the Fall Foliage Thinlits dies, some of which have stamping to give the impression of vein texture while some have the wonderful 3D Leaf Veins embossing folder adding glorious actual impressions.

Some come with their own embossing built in - the dark Impresslit leaves, for instance...

And some come with their own embossing folder included with the die - these large Layered Leaf ones, which have been longtime favourites.

The shimmers of Treasure Gold White Fire gilding wax add to the burnishing of the Distress Mica Spray which you can see gleaming in places.

So, with the backgrounds and the leaves all ready to go, it was just a question of grabbing a couple of other bits and bobs to create my little collages for each tag.  I try to position things so that it creates a nice journey for the eyes travelling from tag to tag as well as looking at the whole set.

Photobooth photos often seem to do the trick.  They're really useful when you're creating a set or group because you have an element which is the same, but always different because each face, each personality is different.

Though I will confess I deliberately sought out some nice cheerful expressions for this particular trio... trying to keep my own chin up as moving day draws closer and there still seems to be a LOT to do.

The cheesecloth scraps serve a double function - creating a pale layer between the leaves and the background, so that they show up better...

... and creating lots of movement and delicious organic randomness with the frayed threads escaping all over the shop.

The film strip offers great vertical architecture to give the otherwise organic and scruffy collaging a sense of structure.

It also catches the light beautifully - which, as regulars will know, is an ongoing obsession in my creative journey.

There have to be words - this is Words and Pictures after all...

... so I did a bit of snipping of some Quote Chips to get individual words to suit my mood and the look of the tags.

And a bit of Rusty Hinge/Crackling Campfire/Vintage Photo blending around the edges makes them pop as well as tone in with the autumnal theme all around them.

Some simple fine twine to top things off, and we're pretty much there, I think.

I hope you'll be inspired to create some Pairs, Trios or Sets this month with us.

There are some wonderful projects over at A Vintage Journey to help kick you into action so do take a look.

As always, we'll be picking some of our favourites to feature on our Pinworthies Pinterest boards at the end of the month.  So I hope we'll see you somewhere down the road with your group projects!!

Thank you so much for stopping by today.  Stay safe, stay well out there - or even better, stay in and stay creative.  See you all again soon.

How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and colour are their last days.
John Burroughs

Country View Challenges are playing Anything But A Card this month so I'd like to play along

At Tag Tuesday the new theme for this fortnight is Texture - plenty of that going on here!

Almost all these leaves are dry Embossed so I'm sharing them at Try It On Tuesday

And finally... Leafy Watercolours Part IV

Hello all... at last I have the rest of my watercolour leaf studies here to show you.  "And finally", says the post title, because it's the final collection, but also "and finally" because it's a week late.  I wasn't late finishing the paintings themselves... just with getting around to writing the blogpost!

I finished these on the 31st July (with one extra to make the nice round number of 32), but haven't had a chance to get around to blogging them.






And once I was a week late, I thought I might as well wait until the next Paint Party Friday to publish the post.  That way I can join in there and enjoy what everyone else has been painting this week too.













I shan't keep you long with this... there's been a mammoth post this week already with my trio of corrugated panels, as well as an Encore to enjoy.














Even though I'm late sharing them, I'm feeling pretty good about completing the whole daily challenge of World Watercolour Month.















Okay, I didn't use the official prompts, but I did watercolour every day in July, and learned so much as I went.











I can show you a quick look at the penultimate pairing, where I did some background painting to create the setting before adding the final stems. 

So these got a very rough first draft - just some grassy energy and shaping.













Then I filled in with some of the more distant stems and grasses.















And finally in go the main studies.














Oh, and a quick palette update.  You saw it in week 1 (where you can also find a complete list of the colours), and here's what it looks like now.  Still plenty of paint to play with for another batch... but I have ideas about what other colours I might want to add in.






In any case, without more ado, here are the final batch in their pairs.  (I worked out I shouldn't cut them up even now.  Should I want to sell prints, it would work out more cheaply to have them printed as A4 pairs and then cut them than as A5 individual paintings!)

Days 25 and 26...

Days 27 and 28...

Days 29 and 30...

Days 31 and 32... finishing up with a pair which are definitely amongst my favourites, and ironically the most similar to numbers 1 and 2... go figure!

I hope you've enjoyed this month's worth of leafy watercolours.  I've had a lovely time exploring, remembering, playing and discovering.  It's made me determined not to leave so long between watercolouring sessions ever again!

Thanks so much for joining me for this stage of my watercolour journey.  I'll be back with some more regular Distress Ink playtime some time this weekend.  Hope to catch you soon, either here or elsewhere in Craftyblogland.  Stay safe, stay well everyone.

The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he's dead.
Bette Davis

I'd like to join in with Paint Party Friday - belatedly, but happily!  They are now on Week 24 of Year 10

Collect Beautiful Gelli Prints!

Hello all!  I hope you're all doing okay.  Here's some distraction for you today - it's time for a new challenge theme over at A Vintage Journey, and for the next month the lovely Julia wants you to have a play with your Gelli plates because It's Gelli Time!




As always there's lots of fabulous inspiration from the Creative Guides to start you off, so do make sure to check it all out.

I've got a very photo heavy post for you (yes, another one after the Creative Skypeing extravaganza, sorry!) but this is what happens when you start playing with the Gelli plate... you never get just one print.  I ended up with eight tags (and a few spares that I didn't like so much)... printed front and back!

So what was I to do with them all?  Well, I bound them into a book so join me as I turn the pages for you.

I'm afraid I don't have much on the process... there often isn't time when you're drawing prints to keep stopping to take photos.  Besides, I got into the swing of things and was really just working intuitively, printing and reprinting to build the layers until I was happy.











I do have a couple of photos from before it was all assembled - here are the tags, one side of the sets at least.  I did some inky prints over the paint on some of them, so that you get translucent layers too.











As you may have spotted in the top left of that group photo, I started out with some real leaves in the printing process.

Using natural elements is my favourite thing to do with the Gelli plate, and the multiple print thing happened to me last time I had some Gelli playtime too, when I ended up with my Meadow Medley album.












I like that in places you can see them hovering in the layers...

I like to work with quite watery washes of paint on the Gelli plate for some layers, or with ink and water to create soft artsy effects.











For the most part the stencil became my major tool for adding detail.  The leaves kept curling round the brayer which was really annoying!















Once I decided I was going to make a book, I did some stamping with the Field Notes stamp set onto some watery inked card to create lots of ephemera to use in collages on each page.











I like that there are lots of the same labels and fragments, repeated in various formations.  It gives the album a harmonious feel to have those elements echoing from page to page.













For the cover, I used some of those same ephemera in a simple collage with some of the paint-covered leaves and the other element which became part of the harmony - some flowers stamped and embossed for extra delight.








So, I'm mostly going to shut up now and let you see the finished mini-album with maybe a few words about the stories emerging in the collages...  I hope you enjoy seeing it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Remember, all the tiny photos will become big ones if you click on them for a close-up.







Let's start with the completed cover...

The book is bound very simply with rustic twine.








As well as the real leaves (sealed with matte medium), I added some glass droplets of "dew" and tangled thread to give movement and randomness.

There's a butterfly from the Field Notes ephemera packs, and a quote chip, all layered over the tiny flower tendrils stamped in Pumice Stone and clear-embossed.

Given the topic is Gelli prints, I didn't want to cover the pages too much...
















... so the collaging inside is very minimal.








As well as my hand-stamped ephemera, there are some Photobooth photos, embossed stamping of nature images...

... and some of my new PaperArtsy quotes mainly from EAB16 Magic & Wonder.  There's a real joy and positivity to the words in this set... I feel they're much-needed right now.







On the next page spread, the tiny flowers are embossed in bright white...
















... and you have Celia's joyous exclamation from As You Like It by William Shakespeare.








I added embossing ink around the edges in places, and these words just had to go with the lovely silhouette print of the leaves.

It's almost a one-layer print, but I added the tiny touch of inked stencil printing very late on.  Happy tags!







The next pages are full of insects - the one from the ephemera pack leaps to the eye...















... and then there are some multiple Entomology stampings done in Pumice Stone and clear-embossed for sunlit shimmer.








The quote here is an odd-one-out.  Rather than Magic & Wonder, it's from EAB02 Darkness & Light, but it felt like it belonged with these happy women.

The circle stamping is done with a Distress Paint lid, and of course there's always white spatter to add extra life.







A fragment of story on the next pages - the young girl full of Celia-like enthusiasm for the wonders of the world...














... and the older woman looking back and knowing that it is from that joy and curiosity in the things around you that wisdom grows as you get older.








We're back to the Pumice Stone flowers here, and lots of inky stencil layers on the prints - a couple of my favourites...

The balancing act of the collages at the far edges, with the book page butterfly turning into a beautiful blue one on the facing page, makes this one of my favourite spreads in the book.







For the next pages, I shifted the collage positions to the inner edges of the tag book, towards the "spine" (can't really be a spine with only one point of attachment, can it?!).














And we're back to some more insects, ephemeral and embossed, this time against some slightly deeper colour tones on the gelli prints themselves.







Since she has a whole letter to read there, I decided she didn't need any extra words.  I think from the smile on her face that it's from someone rather special to her.

You can feel her excitement about the letter buzzing off the page, like the energetic bees surrounding her - or is that just me?!







This one is probably my favourite spread of the whole book - though it's a close-run thing, to be honest.















I love the lighter than air prints and the glint of the skeleton leaves (Pumice stone, clear-embossing again).









The dragonfly perched on his grassy stem was a late addition, but he really makes it come alive for me.  And the W.B. Yeats quote is an out and out favourite too - just beautiful, and so true.

My senses are certainly sharper now that the roads are little quieter and time stretches out a little further.  Or else the birds are singing more loudly all of a sudden!






The young girl puts in another appearance on the final spread (I'm pretty sure it's the same girl as was in the hat earlier), and you can see how confident she is in the beauty of the natural world.













I love how these two tags have a sort of ombre moving across them from the yellow-greens at the left to the more vivid blues over at the right.  Complete serendipity - I didn't know this particular front and back would end up playing together!






More of the gorgeous, rambling white embossed flower vines here (it's the Rubber Dance Weed Love stamp again - it's working overtime this spring here at Words and Pictures!).

And the large and small butterflies echoing one another on the facing pages really please me too, for some reason.

The back cover (happily) is one of the prints I wasn't so wild about - it was a bit too colourful! - but it's had plenty of white splatter and inking around the edges and lots of lid-stamped bubbles and I'm now fine with it being the end of the book.







So there you have it.  I know it's one of those War and Peace-length posts, but I really have tried to keep the chat to a minimum so that you can just focus on the photos.  One day soon I'm going to experiment with a bit of video filming, because I'm well aware that with a book, your best bet is to turn the pages on camera.  I'm not there yet, though, so here's a quick flip through to let you see the page spreads in their full connected glory.

If you hop over to A Vintage Journey you'll find lots more inspiration from my fellow Creative Guides who have all been enjoying the fact that It's Gelli Time!  We hope you'll be inspired to travel along with us at some point this month.  If there was ever a crafting activity to absorb your attention and distract you from everything that's going on, it's creating prints.

Thanks so much for stopping by today and bearing with me to the end of this mammoth blogpost.  This blog is my virtual scrapbook, so the record is for me too.

If something were to happen to this journal or if I decide to give it away/sell it, then I'll still be able to enjoy it (and have a record should I want to create something similar).





I hope you're all staying well, and that these light-filled, positive pages have given you some respite from the real world out there.  Stay safe and I'll see you soon.

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.
Alice Walker

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
Confucius

Try It On Tuesday are hosting a theme called Beauty of Nature.  I'm guessing this won't be my only entry!!
At the Funkie Junkie Boutique Blog the challenge is April Showers Bring May Flowers - over my watery prints are lots of trailing flower tendrils, so I hope it will fit in well there too
The Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge has a Spring Moodboard this week - this is full of the joys of spring, but again, mainly those blues and greens from the top corner.
Tag Tuesday are looking for Bunnies and Butterflies - no bunnies I'm afraid, but plenty of butterflies and multiple tags!
At the Sweet Stampin' Challenge they want you to Make Your Own Background
As usual Anything Mixed Media Goes over at the Creative Artiste Challenge Blog
I'd also like to share this Gelli journal in the March/April challenge at Mini Album Makers
There's just time for one final entry at More Mixed Media where the theme is Anything Goes with an optional twist of Green
I'm always in two minds about whether insects count as animals, but I'm going to risk it and play along with Animal Magic over at Country View Challenges